The Year of Mark Twain

By
Jerry Griswold

Given my white hair and bushy eyebrows, I have heard more than a few times that I look like Mark Twain. This resemblance is a source of amusement to my friends. A few months ago we went to see Hal Holbrook in “Mark Twain Tonight,” his famous show where he impersonates Samuel Clemens. My friends joked that at the intermission I got more requests for autographs than Hal Holbrook. This year I've decided to take advantage of that resemblance.

2010 marks the 175th anniversary of Clemens's birth, the 100th anniversary of his death, and the 125th anniversary of the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Celebrations will be taking place all over the country and abroad. At this very moment, no doubt, hundreds of school children are writing reports on his books. Come summer, I predict, dozens of small towns in the South will host look-alike contests where young people will dress like Tom Sawyer or Becky Thatcher. As for me, having written a good deal about Twain and having purchased a white suit, I'm hanging out my shingle and advertising my availability for talks at your local library.

In my experience, folks want to know about the life of the man who wrote those classic books. If the curious are adults, I send them in the direction of Justin Kaplan's solid biography Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, but if they're youngsters I point them to Sid Fleischman's The Trouble Begins at 8. Fleischman's amusing work is subtitled “A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West.” And that's where it all began.

Samuel Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri (it would later become St. Petersburg in his books). Seeking more adventure and fortune than Hannibal could offer, the young Sam hatched a plan to make his first million by importing coca (a then legal stimulant taken for listlessness). So, he made a riverboat trip to New Orleans with the idea of traveling on from there to South America where he would set up business. But he got distracted. By the time he got to New Orleans, this bored boy from a sleepy hamlet had discovered excitement at last--in the glamorous world of steamboat pilots. He decided to become one.

Clemens called his years as a steamboat pilot the happiest of his life, but they were brought to an early end when the Civil War broke out and the rivers were shut down to traffic. So, Sam promptly signed up for the Confederate Army; as he said, after two weeks of learning all he could about retreating, he quit and joined his older brother Orion who was heading to Nevada as Territorial Secretary. Out West, Sam tried his hand at prospecting, started a forest fire, and eventually turned to journalism, making ends meet by writing about such things as jumping-frog contests and adopting the name “Mark Twain” (a term used to describe the depth necessary for the safe passage of a steamboat).

Leaving Nevada, he became a humorist on the lecture circuit and eventually traveled to Europe; he would write about that trip in his hilarious and best-selling book Innocents Abroad. On his return, he met and eventually married Livy Langdon, and they set up home in their famous steamboat-like mansion in Hartford, Connecticut. They were living there in 1876 when The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published and when “Mark Twain” became a name associated with children's books.

The most famous scene in Tom Sawyer is, of course, the “whitewashing of the fence” where Tom is faced with a boring chore and hoodwinks his friends so that they pay for the privilege of painting the fence. Tom Sawyer is a sunny book full of comic scenes like this, incidents that remind you of childhood: superstitions, warts, playing hooky, pretending to be pirates, boring school recitals, and playground romances with girls like Becky Thatcher. The next novel was different.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a darker book and probably meant for older readers. To be sure, it is often remembered as a summer's tale about a barefoot boy and an escaped slave riding a raft down the Mississippi and trailing their feet in the water; and perhaps it is just that kind of story for young readers. But growing older, many will come to realize that—as Lionel Trilling said—this book is “America's most eloquent argument against racism.” Indeed, if the central moment in Tom Sawyer is where Tom is admired for tricking his friends into whitewashing, the most important moment in Huckleberry Finn is its opposite: where Huck plays a trick on Nigger Jim and Jim calls the boy out for treating a friend like that. As Huck later explains, he got down on his knees and apologized to Jim, and he “weren't never sorry for it afterwards.”

The third of Twain's three great children's books is The Prince and the Pauper, a novel I have a special fondness for and that was written in tandem with Huckleberry Finn. In one book Twain unwinds Huck's racism when, after his apology to Jim, Huck comes to the slow realization that black folks have feelings same as white folks do. In the other book, Twain unwinds the prejudices of class because once the prince exchanges clothes and places with the pauper, this member of the royalty comes to learn that the poor folks have feelings the same as rich folks do. The prince learns this by living, as it were, in another's skin. You might call this learning by impersonation.

That's a lovely phrase--“learning by impersonation”--and an apt one for someone like myself with a white suit in his closet. But think about it. It's also a wonderful description of reading.

So, here's to Mark Twain! Here's hoping 2010 is a wonderful year for introducing new readers to Mark Twain and here's hoping that his books get passed down for generations!

If you just want the novel, then there are many, many editions of the book. But my experience is that kids are often introduced to this book in high school, where it can be controversial. For that reason, I recommend this edition by Graff and Phelan because they collect in an appendix many worthwhile essays on the topic of race and the book's reception. These encourage useful discussions.

Again, there are multiple editions of this book to choose from. But I am partial to this one because I am responsible for it; besides the Introduction, I labored for a year with various first editions to create what I believe is a version of the text most faithful to Clemens' intentions.

About the Author
Jerry Griswold is the Director of San Diego State University's National Center for the Study of Children's Literature. His most recent book is Feeling Like a Kid.